About the Book

Long before descending into the underworld of addiction in Permanent Midnight—the memoir, and later film, that made him famous—Jerry Stahl had built a singular literary career reporting from America’s psychic gutters and cultural sideshows. Ricocheting from porn sets, beauty pageants, televangelists, celebrity implosions, recovery culture, and Hollywood grotesquerie to darker territories of illness, addiction, Jewish identity, and survival, Stahl’s writing has always been electric—but much of it has never been digitized.

Now, in Gonzo Neurotic, Stahl brings together the magazine work that made him with the fiction, memoir, and screenwriting he has honed over decades, interleaved with his own mordant present-day commentary on youthful lunacy and catastrophic life choices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, the book takes readers from the “wet heart of Pageantland” at the Miss America pageant to the post-nuclear sets of cult erotica and the surreal writers’ rooms of ALF and Moonlighting. Stahl charts his rapid mental and physical decline alongside profiles of figures like Marlon Brando, Samuel L. Jackson, and Benicio del Toro. The result is a sharp, wickedly funny, and ultimately cathartic reckoning through a half century of cultural and personal upheaval.

Praise for Jerry Stahl

“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.”

—Anthony Bourdain

“No one can make me laugh while kicking me down the dark tunnel of self like Jerry Stahl.”

—Marc Maron

“Gonzo Neurotic is hilarious, brutal and outrageously self-revelatory. Stahl writes with a kind of wildass genius that renders the mundane deranged and the deranged relatable. He is a complete original, and one of my favorite living writers.” 

—Lydia Lunch

“An acid wit as deadly serious as it is hilarious.”

—Eric Bogosian

“Stahl is celebrated for his masochistic honesty that is never less than brutal and almost always on the other side of hope.” 

—The Brooklyn Rail

“A better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.”

—The New Yorker

“Jerry, you are an extraordinary, eccentric and screwed-up human being.” 

—Isabel Allende

“Wisecracking, poignant and frequently hilarious, the voice never cracks . . . in terms of its getting under [the subject’s] skin . . . it’s without equal.”

—The Independent

“Gonzo meets the Shoah in this wildly irreverent—and brilliant—tour . . . Vivid, potent, decidedly idiosyncratic.”

—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Mordantly funny . . . Fusing provocative insights with razor-edged wit, this offers a captivating take on a haunting chapter of history. 

—Publishers Weekly

“A Kafkaesque masterpiece . . . flavorful rum punch in the face.” 

—Bookreporter

About the Author